By Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
Pp. vi, 804. $50 hardcover.
Biographies of economists are still rare, especially compared with monographs about them. For F. A. Hayek we could already rely on Caldwell’s earlier Hayek’s Challenge (2004, Chicago: University of Chicago Press), Peter Boettke’s more recent F. A. Hayek (2018, London: Palgrave Macmillan), Jeremy Shearmur’s more politically oriented Hayek and After (1996, London: Routledge), as well as a number of other books. But this new book by Caldwell and Klausinger is a genuine biography that focuses on Hayek’s life and personality, with his ideas in the background. The book tells the story of his life from his birth until 1950, the moment that Hayek started his academic career in the United States at the Committee of Social Thought in Chicago.
The question is what this work adds to our knowledge of Hayek as a person, a thinker, and a liberal. And the simple answer is a lot. The biography excels in the way it embeds Hayek in his familial and social setting, and it demonstrates the extent to which his work was shaped, mainly in critical response, to the major intellectual developments of his age. Caldwell and Klausinger tell the story by providing a rich context of Hayek’s intellectual endeavors, first in Vienna and subsequently in London. The book also provides two major personal stories about Hayek’s private life that were perhaps not unknown to Hayek afficionados, but that are told here in much greater detail than ever before. These are, first, the gradual political and personal development away from his mother and brother Heinz, who were much less critical of the rising fascism and antisemitism during the interwar period than Hayek was. And second, the disintegration of his first marriage with Hella von Fritsch and the eventual ugly divorce that Hayek enforced in order to marry his first love, Helene “Lenerl” Bitterlich. In this review I will, therefore, focus on these lesser-known aspects to show
